In Pixar’s Coco, the Land of the Dead is a stunning piece of animation, embedded with tiny pinpricks of light scattered throughout precarious towers of houses stacked upon houses. And springing out of this land are luminescent bridges made of marigold, bridging the way from the Land of the Dead to the Land of the Living.

It’s a majestic sight that’s all at once familiar and unfamiliar, as the production and set designers of Coco wanted to forge their own paths independent of animated films that evoked the afterlife before them — like The Book of Life or The Corpse Bride — but at the same time pay homage to the rich Mexican landscape in which the film is set.

“Mexico is a designer’s dream and I knew that we would feature the rich colors and textures that we saw there,” production designer Harvey Jessup said.Read More »